Utilising ideas from post-modernism and post-humanism Theorizing Animals challenges current ways of thinking about animals and their relationships with humans. Including contributions from across the social sciences Theorizing Animals encourages readers to reflect upon taken for granted ways of conceptualising human relaitonships with animals.
Theorizing Animals will be of interest to those in the broad field of human-animal studies as well as those within most social science and humanities disciplines including sociology, anthropology, philosophy and social theory.
Preface: In Hope of Change: Rethinking Human-Animal Relations?
Lynda Birke
Introduction
Nik Taylor
PART ONE
KNOTTY PROBLEMS: TO THEORISE OR NOT?
1. Mapping Human Animal Relations
Peter Beatson
2. Theorizing ‘Others’
Lisa Kemmerer
PART TWO
ANIMALS AND MODERNITY
3. The Underdog in History: Serfdom, Slavery and Species in the Creation and Development of Capitalism
Mary Murray
4. Dangerous Dogs and The Construction of Risk
Claire Molloy
5. Ritual, Reason and Animals
Gavin Kendall
PART THREE
ANIMAL PERFORMERS
6. The Representation of Animal Actors: Theorizing Performance and Performativity in the Animal Kingdom
Gregory S. Szarycz
7. The Gaze of Animals
Philip Armstrong
PART FOUR
FORWARD THINKING
8. Can Sociology Contribute to the Emancipation of Animals?
Nik Taylor
9. Theorising Rider-Horse Relations: An Ethnographic Illustration of the Centaur Metaphor in the Spanish
Bullfight
Kirrilly Thompson
10. Ciliated Sense
Eva Hayward
Concluding Remarks: From Theory to Action: An Ethologist’s Perspective
Jonathan Balcombe